Professor Sandy Douglas
Professor Alexander "Sandy" Shafto Douglas CBE (born 21 May 1921,
died 29 April 2010) was a British professor of computer science,
credited with creating the first graphical Computer game OXO (also
known as Noughts and Crosses) a tic-tac-toe computer game in 1952 on
the EDSAC computer at University of Cambridge.
Douglas was
born on May 21, 1921 in London. At age eight, his family moved to
Cromwell Road, near what would become the London Air Terminal.
In the winter of 1938–39, Douglas and his future wife Andrey
Parker made a snowman in the grounds of the Natural History Museum.
Douglas and his wife would go on to have two children, and at least
two grandsons.
During the Blitz, in 1940–41, Douglas's Home
Guard Unit, 'C' Company of the Chelsea and Kensington Battalion of
the KRRC, had its headquarters in the basement of the Royal School
of Mines, just the other side of Exhibition Road from the museums.
Douglas attended the University of Cambridge in 1950. In 1952,
while working towards earning his PhD, he wrote a thesis which
focused on human-computer interactions and he needed an example to
prove his theories. At that time, Cambridge was home to the second
only stored-program computer, the EDSAC or Electronic Delay Storage
Automatic Calculator (the first being Manchester University's "Small
Scale Experimental Machine" or SSEM, nicknamed "The Baby", which ran
its first program June 21, 1948). This gave Douglas the perfect
opportunity to prove his findings by programming the code for a
simple game where a player can compete against the computer — OXO.
In 1953 he was elected as a Prize Fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge; Douglas spends a year at the University of Illinois
Computation laboratory as assistant Professor. In 1955 he became
Junior Bursar of Trinity College.
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The Leeds Pegasus computer
was installed in autumn 1957 in the Eldon Chapel on Woodhouse Lane.
Douglas set up the Computer Laboratory of the University of Leeds,
and it was there that he first became interested in the application
of computers to business problems.
The Pegasus holds an especial
place in my affection, it being the machine I installed as the
central University machine in a disused chapel in Leeds in 1957 — it
was known as Lucifer, for Leeds University Computing Installation (FERranti).
Our au pair girl from Spain made a beautiful little devilish doll
which decorated the machine — it has probably disappeared by now.
In June 1960 the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals
set up a Working Party to explore the creation of a national system
for handling university admissions. Douglas was appointed a member
of the Working Party to provide advice on the use of computers in
this system. He had previously worked at Leeds with Ronald Kay, who
was to become UCCA's General Secretary, on "an early and primitive
but successful attempt to introduce computer methods into student
registration procedures".
He entered the commercial field in
1960 as Technical Director of the UK subsidiary of C-E-I-R (now
Scientific Control Systems), leaving in 1968 to initiate the
European software interests of Leasco Systems and Research Ltd. as
Chairman.
In 1980 I worked out that an Apple with two floppy
disc drives was about 300 times as powerful as the Pegasus at
1/300th of the cost. Today we can assume that a further reduction of
100 times in cost per operation has taken place, though I haven' t
done the sums with a 486-based micro. We must also bear in mind that
the Pegasus represented an improvement of at least tenfold in cost
per operation over earlier machines. An industry that has reduced
its cost per operation by a factor of 10 million or so over 45 years
is surely unique and certainly not easy to keep pace with mentally.
We are now faced with the problem of what to do about software. The
article, like a book, is easy to 'preserve', but to run it requires
the original hardware or an emulator. Martin Campbell-Kelly has
built an emulator of EDSAC I, and can run the programs on it. But it
is difficult, even impossible, to give the flavour of what they did
without the photoreader and the screen, since the ability to use
these as input or output in unconventional ways, as in my noughts
and crosses program where the players interrupted the light beam to
input a move and viewed the storage monitor to see the 'board',
cannot readily be reproduced on the emulating equipment. The matter
becomes even more awkward with micros, where programs of similar
nature, eg Wordstar, Wordperfect and Word, have been implemented on
several different machines so as to look as nearly alike as possible
to the user. No doubt this will be taken up by the CCS Working
Parties in due course and some solutions found for working
presentations, which must be our aim. All of us on the Committee
look forward to welcoming assistance from whatever quarter, in our
efforts to carry forward a memory of this fascinating and fast
changing industry in working order!
He has been a consultant
to various agencies of the United Nations over the past decade,
including the Office of Science and Technology
the Human Rights
Commission, the Statistical Office of the U.N., the I.L.O. and
UNESCO.
He has acted as a consultant also for several
international companies including Shell, Philips, and ICI.
Between 1970 and 1974 he acted as Expert Adviser to Sub-Committees D
& A of the Select Committee of Parliament on Science and Technology
for their enquiry into computing. Between 1976 and 1977 he served on
the Sub-Committee C of the Select Committee on the Nationalised
Industries for their enquiries into Cable and Wireless Ltd. and the
Tote. From 1973 to 1978 he was Non-executive Director of the
Monotype Corporation.
In October 1969 he became Professor of
Computational Methods at the London School of Economics. He was
Vice-Chairman of the Academic Board on the Board of Management of
the University of London Computer Centre and Moderator to the
Computer Science Department of Hong Kong Polytechnic.
A
funder member of the British Computer Society, he helped to found
the Leeds Branch and became its first Chairman. He has served on
many of its Committees, and is a Fellow and past President
(1971/1972).
He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics
and its Applications, a Member of the O.R. Society, the Association
for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Data for Development. He
is Vice-President of IFIP, the international computer coordinating
body and Chairman of its Committee on International Liaison. He also
represented IFIP on the Five International Associations Coordinating
Committee, which coordinates the work of IFIP with that of IFORS,
IFAC, AICA and IMEKO.
He was, in 1977, awarded the IFIP
Silver Core award.
He is also:
a Member of the British
National Committee for support of the Unesco General Information
Programme, and of the BNC for IIASA
Governor of the International
Council for Computer Communication.
Writings
Over 60
papers have been published by Professor Douglas covering topics in
Atomic Physics, Crystallography, Solution of Differential Equations,
Computer Design, Programming and Operational Research in the
Shipbuilding, Oil Chemical Mining, Engineering and Transportation
Industries, and in the Printing Industry.
Douglas, Alexander
Shafto; May 18, 1954; "Some Computations in Theoretical Physics",
PhD Dissertation 2478, (University of Cambridge. Faculty of
Mathematics).
Computers and Society: an Inaugural Lecture
[Delivered on 27 April 1972, by Alexander Shafto Douglas; Publisher:
London School of Economics and P; Date Published: 1973. ISBN
978-0-85328-019-4 ISBN 0-85328-019-3.
Science Journal, October
1970 "Computers in the Seventies", Alexander “Sandy” Douglas.
Computer Networks, Volume 5, 1981, pp. 9–14. "Computers and
Communications in the 1980's: Benefits and Problems", Alexander S.
Douglas
Sandy Douglas, "Some Memories of EDSAC I: 1950–1952",
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 98–99,
208, October 1979. {{doi:10.1109/MAHC.1979.10018}}
Douglas
died in sleep on April 29, 2010, from pneumonia.
Any contributions to this item will be
gratefully accepted
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